So… keeping in step with the whole social media thing, I just created a Twitter account for The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire. Should you desire to entangle yourself a little further in twits tweets, feel free to follow us here: twitter.com/MotHV (Some asshat spammer squatted on HauntedVampire. Did I say asshat already? Asshat.). I’ve integrated our RSS feed into it, so as long as there’s content here, there’ll be content there.

And yes, I think the whole Twitter thing deserves to be filed under ‘Unexplained weirdness.’

From our nation’s most trust worthy news source since the demise of the Weekly World News comes this:

WASHINGTON—The disappearance of a sixth Senate page in less than two months has renewed old fears in the legislative branch, leaving many to wonder if the legendary congressional swamp creature has returned.

snip

In response to the recent spate of attacks, Senate majority leader Harry Reid has implored legislators to set aside partisanship and pass a bill to end the swamp monster’s reign of terror. But despite the urgency of the situation, the proposal has been mired in political maneuvering and stalled in committee due to disagreements over the bill’s wording.

“We almost passed a funding allocation bill to purchase a flamethrower and burn the hideous half-man, half-salamander alive, until someone attached a $34 million rider for commercial logging in Montana,” Reid said while boarding up his office windows. “And now that…thing has got another one of ours. It’s time to take matters into our own hands and draft an immediate-action resolution with much stronger language.”

Added Reid, “Our only hope is that poor Molly has sated its appetite for long enough to pass this amendment to the Procedure and Administration section of Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code.”

This is not the first time legislators have found themselves living in terror of the scaly abomination. During Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the 8th U.S. Congress lost nine senators and 21 representatives to the aquatic fiend before it was able to secure enough votes to pass H.R. 243, the Back From Whence It Came proposal. In 1954, Sens. Sam Ervin (D-NC) and Henry Dworshak (R-ID) thought they had finally destroyed the swamp creature for good, after repeatedly stabbing the beast, spraying it with DDT, and dumping its body in the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. But after legislators discovered the gruesome remains of the Energy and Water Development subcommittee a few weeks later, Ervin admitted they had probably only aggravated the monster’s aquatic wrath.

There haven’t been this many Congressional staffers found dead since Joe Scarborough and Gary Condit were in office.

Early in June I woke at dawn to let my dog out and found a wooden crate, the type used decades ago by a tea importer, outside the back door. The box was nearly identical to one I had found in an old barn in Ohio years earlier. The Ohio crate had contained diaries and journals of several people as well as newspapers and photographs – all from the 1890s – and a previously unknown story from author William Hope Hodgson that appeared to have been written in 1913 shortly before he left for the war that claimed his life. I had published several of the diary entries and the Hodgson story online as The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire.

My dog sniffed the box outside the back porch door with a suspicious air before she walked off to do her business under the trees.

I looked around, but did not see anyone. On top of the crate was an envelope with a handwritten note inside. The writer claimed to have tracked me down and left the chest to me because of my previous interest in the contents of the other crate. I carried the crate inside with my dog following at my heels. I set it on the kitchen table. Inside I found letters, notebooks, folders holding sheaths of yellowed, typewritten manuscripts, and a photo album containing dozens of images from the 1920s and 1930s.

As my morning coffee brewed, I glanced through the contents of the folder on top. It appeared to have been a manuscript written in the style of a 1930s pulp magazine story. My first guess was, of course, that the story was fictional. But as I went through the box and read the notebooks and what appeared to be investigation reports I began to wonder. I now suspect the story referred to actual events and the unknown author wrote up the account as a fictional story. I do not know if the author ever attempted to publish his or her stories, but I suspect from the writing style they were intended for Weird Tales or another pulp horror or adventure magazine such as Weird Spicy Tales.

In the initial story, with chapters posted on Fridays (photos on Wednesdays), and in other stories, there are references to other investigations, hidden pasts, dark deeds referenced only in passing, and secret organizations. I shall do my best to fill in the blanks where possible, but those secrets might be hidden away in other crates, perhaps to be unveiled at a later date.

After a closer examination of the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with the great Archimedes.

Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C.

snip

The mechanism’s connection with the Corinthians was unexpected, the researchers said, because other cargo in the shipwreck appeared to be from the eastern Mediterranean, places like Kos, Rhodes and Pergamon. The months inscribed on the instrument, they wrote, are “practically a complete match” with those on calendars from Illyria and Epirus in northwestern Greece and with the island of Corfu. Seven of the months suggest a possible link with Syracuse.

Inscriptions also showed that one of the instrument’s dials was used to record the timing of the panhellenic games, a four-year cycle that was “a common framework for chronology” by the Greeks, the researchers said.

“The mechanism still contains many mysteries,” Dr. Freeth said, citing questions about some of the remnant gears and a star almanac at the front that has confounded the experts.

It even predates DOS!

The good question down lower in the story is why the technology disappeared.

LAKE CITY — Rumors surface every few years. Ever since the historical siting on April 28, 1871, there have been stories about a monster in Lake Pepin.

The Lake City Tourism Bureau has decided to try and find out the truth. The bureau is enlisting the public’s help by offering a $50,000 reward to anyone who can prove the existence of the creature living in Lake Pepin that is commonly referred to as “Pepie.”

The native Dakota people who lived along the Mississippi River were afraid to travel on Lake Pepin in birchbark canoes because of “large creatures” that would surface on the Lake and puncture the thin birchbark skin, according to tourism bureau spokesman Larry Nielson. They would only travel on the lake in the more stoutly made dugout canoes.

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. (AP) — A man who was found with a woman’s body packed in dry ice in his hotel room told a newspaper that her death may have been in some way connected to religion.

”Everything that happened was for religious reasons,” Stephen David Royds told The Orange County Register on Sunday.

Royds spoke to the newspaper in a brief interview from jail. He repeated the statement four times but did not elaborate.

Detectives found the body of Monique Felicia Trepp, 33, fully clothed inside a large Rubbermaid container late Thursday after arresting Royds at the Fairmont Newport Beach for investigation of selling and possessing cocaine, police Sgt. Evan Sailor said.

The strangest part, to my thinking, is that authorities do not believe it was a homicide at this time. For some reason, packing the body in a Rubbermaid container would seem less bizarre to me if it was a murder.